Bad Shortcut By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan Big Driver (2014) Directed by Mikael Salomon

King’s novella Big Driver was published in 2010 in the book Full Dark, No Stars. It’s the story of a woman getting even with the man who brutally raped and attempted to kill her, and I don’t mean she uses the legal system. A story like that sounds like one of those riskier Lifetime Original Movies for Women, and surprise, surprise: that’s exactly what Big Driver is! “Oh boy!” we say with considerable sarcasm. “A Lifetime movie of a Stephen King story! Sign me up!”

Hold your horses. Despite clearly being a televised movie originally (with commercial breaks visible), this is a clear-minded, intense film made fairly riveting by its leading actress, Maria Bello. Bello is always good; I love the woman. She’s got exactly the right touch to play Tess Thorne, a woman who keeps herself from going nervous collapse with wry humor and a stubborn conviction that her attacker deserves to die, that his crime must not happen again to anyone else, and to hell with the police.

Tess is the author of a popular cozy mystery series featuring four elderly women detectives. She has been invited to be the guest speaker for a reading club in some quaint small town in the middle of nowhere. She arrives, gives a talk that the ladies enjoy, sells a few books. Nice work if you can get it! But the drive was a pain in the ass, she tells Ramona, who is writing her check. Not to worry, says Ramona. I’ll give you a shortcut: beautiful scenery, cuts an hour off your drive.

Yes, it is beautiful scenery and Tess has the road almost entirely to herself. This becomes a problem when she runs over some nail-covered boards in the road and has to steer into an abandoned Esso station. Her tire is flat. She has only a vague notion of how to change a tire (same as me!). There is no damned cell signal out here, either. She tries to flag down a couple of cars, but no luck. Jerks!

Finally help arrives in the form of Big Driver. The enormous man hulks out of his truck nearly as broad as he is tall. Big Driver is full of sympathy for her plight. He offers to help her “no charge” and even jokes with her for a few minutes. He starts to change her tire. A patient Tess glances around and notices something ominous. The boards that were left in the road had seemed deliberate to her, like a literal trap, and in the back of his pickup truck, Big Driver has more of the nail-studded boards. Ah, so it seems that help has not arrived after all. Big Driver is eventually going to change her tire – because he can’t leave evidence there – but first, he’s going to put Tess through hell and then leave her for dead in a No matter how much a tow truck costs, I promise you it’s better drain pipe. than this guy’s rate.

Tess’s ordeal is hard to watch, though I appreciate that the movie didn’t pull any punches. It’s not graphic (this is made for television, remember) but rather focuses on Tess’s face as she endures the horror. Damn difficult to see, because Maria Bello is a fine actress with no qualms about making herself haggard. We’ll be able to tell a difference in her face like a “before” and “after” shot, an energetic, creative beauty turned into a haunted, colorless, nervous wreck, and then into a hardened warrior. She’s almost unrecognizable from one phase to the next. None of us would be the same, having lived through something like this. Big Driver leaves Tess in a drainpipe, assuming she’s dead (lucky he didn’t try too hard to check her pulse). She comes conscious a while later and finds she is sharing the space with three other women in various states of decomposition. Oh great, Big Driver is a serial rapist and murderer. In shock, Tess drags herself out of the pipe, back to the road, and walks barefoot to the next town. Cars pass and she hides from them. When she reaches a convenience store, she calls not the police, but her car service, and when the car arrives, she asks the driver to take her home rather than the hospital

Tess never calls the authorities. After having already survived the ordeal that Big Driver put her through, does she want herself put through more trauma? She’s well-aware of how rape victims are treated, especially famous ones, and she sees this as potentially ruining not only her career but her sanity and self-respect. That does not mean she isn’t going to see that he pays. She has her own vengeance to think of, plus she doesn’t want any more women to end up in that drain pipe.

Things could have gotten much grimmer, but Big Driver isn’t going to take that route, haha, pardon the pun. Tess looks for guidance in her own mind. Tess has always “heard” her characters speaking to her, and considers them as friends and advisors. It’s not crazy – I believe most writers do something similar. Tess also has a friend in her GPS “Tom” – some amusing dialog happens there as he serves as her anxious protector and life-advisor. Olympia Dukakis has a wonderful cameo as Tess’s cozy mystery heroine Doreen, who coaches Tess on how to get away with murder. And here’s a real treat: badass rocker Joan Jett appears in a small but important role in the story, and it’s awesome to see her.

And at this point, we must cease our talk, because I won’t spoil the rest of the film for you. It’s pretty damn good, though, carried in the entirely capable hands of Maria Bello. I felt as if she wasn’t denying that she’d been a victim, but she was owning it, and moving on the way that would help her the most.

Thank god – and what a surprise – that the producers didn’t try dragging this movie out to twice this length so they could get two nights of commercial sponsors out of it. That’s often the most fundamental problem with King’s televised novels: not enough material to fill too much time, resulting in a dead-boring watch. Rather, Big Driver is 90 efficiently-told minutes. It was probably made for my very own demographic (women of a certain age) but my movie buddy, who is a man under the age of 25, was also impressed. He was trying to finish up some work on his laptop while I was watching this, and he kept getting distracted by the movie. I don’t think he got much done.